Family-izer 2.5 adds two columns of statistical info

Version 2.5 of Family-izer™ adds two columns of statistical information. The first column shows the total number of family members (sure beats counting them by hand!). For the "International" option, the second column shows the number of unique countries and/or regions that are in the family. This gives a rough sense of the scope of foreign filing for a patent. For the "US only" option, the second column will always be blank.

Try Family-izer today!

Patent Grabber 5.7.3 is now available

We have just released Patent Grabber(TM) 5.7.3. This is another maintenance release to respond to changes made by the European Patent Office to their Open Patent Services server.

All users must upgrade if they wish to maintain the ability to download EP, PCT and International patents as well as INPADOC legal status information after the EPO's cut off date of March 31.

Patent Grabber 5.7.2 is now available

Patent Grabber 5.7.2 should be downloaded by all Ver. 5.x licensed users. Changes made by the European Patent Office to its Open Patent Services server destroyed Patent Grabber's ability to download any EP, PCT, International or INPADOC documents. This is now fixed.

Those same changes also broke Family-izer. A new version (2.4.2) has now been posted to the web site. Do a force reload of the Family-izer page if you do not see Ver. 2.4.2.

Patent Grabber(TM) 5.7.1 now available

Free update for licensed users.

Patent Grabber(TM) 5.7.1 is now available. This is a minor update to conform Patent Grabber to changes that were made on the USPTO server. Due to these changes on the USPTO server, patents or applications that did not contain drawings would download in their entirety even when the user had only selected specific sections to download. This is now fixed.

Patent Grabber 5.7 is now available

Patent Grabber 5.7 is now available for download from the Blazing Dawn Software web site. As mentioned in my previous posting, this version adds the option of including patent family identifiers in a spreadsheet of bibliographic information for U.S. patents. This is a great convenience when you are reviewing a large portfolio of patents from a single company, as it allows the spreadsheet to be sorted by patent family.

This is a free upgrade for licensed users of Patent Grabber 5.x.

Patent family identifiers being added to US Patent Bibliographic Information in Patent Grabber

I once had to analyze the patent portfolio of a company. They had 179 U.S. patents. So I used Patent Grabber's "US Patent Biblio" feature to start with. That gave me a spreadsheet with the bibliographic information for all 179 patents in a couple of minutes.

But with that many patents, I thought it would be useful to be able to group them into their families. That is why I developed Family-izer(TM). Once I had the family information, I gave each family an arbitrary number and entered those numbers in a new column of the spreadsheet. It took a couple of hours, but when I was done I could sort the spreadsheet by family as well as by any of the other columns.

So now I had a brainstorm. Why spend  a couple of hours entering patent family identifiers, when I could add Family-izer functionality to the US Patent Biblio feature! I should be able to automatically get a spreadsheet that already had each patent family assigned an identifying number. No more manual labor!

I have gotten it working. Now I need just a little more testing. Look for Patent Grabber 5.7 in the near future!

Family-izer now works with international patents!

Starting with Family-izer(TM) 2.4, users are no longer restricted to entering only U.S. patents and published applications in the Family-izer search field! With the simple inclusion of a two-letter country code, users can now start with a patent or publication number from many different countries. 

Go to http://www.blazingdawn.com/demo/family-izer.html and try it out. It's free!